20190127-28 – Lima-San Isidro / “Is infidelity common in your culture?”

Lean in a little closer, miniature wheeled air conditioner unit.

Firstly: It’s feels-like 91 degrees F in this 11th floor apartment, buddy. You gotta work a little harder.

Secondly: Here’s the rundown on our first few full days in Lima. Is that wheezing sound an ejaculation of excitement? Woah, calm down, little guy.

We arrived at Lima’s airport – the gateway to South America, some call it, and certainly the gateway into the Metropolis that is Lima and its 10 million plus denizens – at 5 pm. 5 pm is peak soundscape time in Peruvian culture, when each of those millions jumps into a car, meanders their way home from work, and (here’s where the soundscape part comes in) jumps on their horn. It’s a cacophony that doesn’t compare with anything back home in little ol’ Blacksburg, VA. Dave, the expat teacher-surfer-bro we met on the plane ride from Mexico City warned us about this ahead of time, by telling us that in Peru a car horn is the salve for all problems. “Stuck in bumper to bumper traffic? No problem, lean on that horn. Somebody’s wrecked and weeping on the side of the road. Sure fix – honk that puppy” (He said something exactly like this…). After a few days of cab rides and street ambling, though, we’re noticing that this description of *noise, unabridged and ubiquitous* isn’t sufficient. There’s like a whole dialect of horn honking/talking. Amanda, my partner, probs put it best in an email to my uncle Bob and aunt Nan:

“So far we’ve made it safely to Lima and Oh Boy! (Oh Houseboy!) [sic, this is an inside joke] has the driving here made us think Boston and NJ and even Mexico City weren’t this bad! I was surprised we made it safely to our Airbnb. And the honking, I don’t  know if you remember the honking, but my god it’s like there’s a honk for every occasion : “Do you need a ride?”, “Get out of my way”, “watch out I’m turning a corner”, “I’m here, I’m here!’, “Can I go?”, “I’m the fastest!””

(I’ll add that it’s not easy to get a Jersey girl to admit somewhere other than Jersey is supreme when it comes to road chaos).

For me, personally, I don’t have any idea which honks mean what. Other than that there’s usually a gentle double honk, coupled with a arm roving out-the-window rotation, that taxi drivers give when they see people like us who probably need a ride. I’ll have to try to get that one on camera, because it also could mean, “Get out of my town, foreigner.” Equal parts ‘come here’ and ‘fuck off.’ Anyway, maybe that’s Lima in a nutshell.

So all this noise has inspired me to keep a parallel sound blog series on the noises of Peru. In the future, I think these’ll go up on a separate page that can be accessed from this, the main page, but for now I’ll include a little snippet of the chaos. (Note that WordPress doesn’t let me share audio unless I pay. This links to my Onedrive)

**https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnuI5avCh4ybgugGiC17C7gNQibauQ

And, for contrast, the relatively serene sounds of the parque. Not so harsh!

**https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnuI5avCh4ybgugN5hUSYe5FzYMhEQ

My reaction? I like the sounds of this city. I like that they’re varied and loud and ubiquitous. It’s different from my roots; much louder but maybe also more honest. All I can think is that America’s clandestine sububan alcoves, should they ever be visited by a metropolitan Peruvian, must seem so quiet, concealing, and possibly boring.

A few other highlights.

• Getting the sim card. Cell coverage and access is greater and less expensive in Peru than it is in the United States. I think this goes for just about every country in the developing world. You can get a solid 5 GB data plan (no restrictions on common apps like Skype and WhatsApp) with infinite texts and calls for somewhere in the ballpark of $15 – $20. This is music to Amanda’s and my ears, because we teach online and having 4G access that we can link our laptops up to when the WiFi is sketchy is a must-have. The only reason I know about this? My man Briancito at Claro! He was listening to Rihanna in a red T-shirt at a Claro stand in the middle of a grocery store catering to wealthy Peruvians (yes, we went to the place that looked most like Wegman’s to get our first Peruvian groceries, yes we did!). After struggling through our mediocre Spanish for a few minutes he switched to perfecto English to give us the low-down. (Peruvian cell hounds: Yes, from what I’d read online Claro is more expensive than its competitors, but it’s the most reliable and has the largest coverage footprint. [Briancity confirmed, and he’s unbiased, right?]) And that wasn’t all, he gave me his phone number, and chatted us up about our favorite musicians. I told him Dylan, but he and Amanda bonded over their shared love of Beyonce. (How lame is it that I said Dylan?) His last question: “What do Americans think of infidelity? Because in Peru it is very common.” Pretty forward there, buddy. Amanda looked at her ring nervously (we’re not married, but she keeps a fake on her for times like these). But I’m not sure he was looking at her.
• Miraflores, and Playa Waikiki. Dave tipped us off to it, but damn, that beach had it all. Amanda said it reminded her of San Diego. I haven’t really spent anytime on the Pacific coast, so the only thing I could compare it to was paradise. There was no reference. 100 ft cliffs, lush grass, heladodores (ice cream sellers), tons of sun, and -AND – a beach composed of saucer sized stones flattened and smoothed by repetitive wave action. The geology of this place is something I want to follow up on later, but to me one of the coolest things about aggressive coastal areas like this is that the beaches get molded into these hill / valley ranges during high tide. I’ve seen it on Cape Cod, but nothing on this scale. The valleys (filled with water in the attached pictures) are sometimes deep enough to conceal a human, and as the waves rework the rocks with each crash, these valleys are not the place for a human to hang out. It was a great way to cap off our ambling morning along the boulevarded Avenida Arequipa (shut off from car traffic every Sunday morning)
• The last thing to note today is that we walked all around Lima, and discovered what a quick google search could have told us ahead of time. That most of the museums in this town are not open on Monday. Now we are delightfully sunburnt and dehydrated.  Fortunately, nothing a nap and a little bit of water can’t fix.

Hasta luego,

Quinn

 

Hello World

Hello to the great din of the internet! Settle down, settle down. I see you there in the back row! Yes, you, with the red hat and boxers in your mother’s house: Put your hands where I can see them! Very good! Eyes on me…

The talented writer can probably suck you in with wit or a good story. I don’t really have that. I actually 100% don’t expect anyone to be listening. Don’t really care. The fewer the merrier. The back row is empty; there’s actually no one in the auditorium. I’m talking to myself. Indeed, it’s about the only thing that I’ve ever been able to do.

Someone once told me that 90% of thinking is just rearranging one’s own prejudices. That is to say, his advice was to stop thinking so much. Because in doing so I (we) repetitively test and confirm what we think to be true. The conversation goes something like this: ‘Am I a piece of shit’ (I am); ‘Is there a god’ (Still no voices); ‘Can I get over my fear of people who don’t look like me’ (Cue crossing the street, again).

Maybe so.

But I think this point of view is cynical, right? I mean, to think that thought – nay, contemplation – serves no purpose other than to congeal the badnesses within me (us)…. Well, geez, why were we endowed with these big ol’ brains, then? Don’t get me wrong, I try not to be a pedant and I don’t know jack shit about neurology. But it seems to me the problem might be that I don’t do enough thinking these days, that maybe I never had.

So thanks, wordpress, for providing a space for those of use who relish entanglements with the broken armies of our minds and souls. Thanks for forsaking people like me into the land of prejudice. Thanks for making a place to write words that benefit nobody except the person who writes them.

If anyone ever reads this blog, I’m going to delete this post.